Cooperating businesses look toward closer cooperation across existing company borders and between several business partners to achieve improved economic competitiveness and a better reaction to market requirements. Resultant business processes are accompanied by an asynchronous, heterogeneous, loosely coupled and distributed communication via mostly technical low-level event data. To make this event data accessible to business experts or decision makers, the event data can be consolidated and aggregated to higher abstraction levels. This can be achieved using complex event processing (CEP) systems.
Fast and dynamic adaptation of business processes is advantageous to companies. In order to capture the current status of a business process, event data can be analyzed. For example, business experts or decision makers can draw conclusions and make decisions based on incoming event data. In event-based environments, low-level events are provided by event producers and are aggregated to higher level, business relevant events. Business experts and decision makers are able to adapt business processes based on the aggregated events. Further, business experts need to be able to trust and comprehend the aggregated events in order to react appropriately.
To derive reasonable and business relevant decisions from aggregated event data, a responsible business expert has to analyze and explore the data. This can be a complex process, because business event data can be subject to several distinct dimension level hierarchies such as time, location, data source, company organization level, data quality or event type.